The word “rubber” had a lively existence long before it became attached to the elastic substance we associate it with today.

A “rubber” could be a hard brush (1664), a rough towel to stimulate the skin (1577), a horse towel (1598), a whetstone (1553), tooth powder (1558), a polished brick (1744), a person who takes brass rubbings (1840) and a masseur at a Turkish bath.

When samples of the dried sap of a South American tree began arriving in England in the late 18th century, they were soon being stocked in half-inch cubes in Edward Nairne’s scientific instrument shop at 20 Cornhill in London. Nairne claimed that while drawing he had picked up a piece of the substance instead of the breadcrumb that was traditionally used to erase pencil marks. The cube of sap proved more effective.

The discoverer of oxygen and inventor of soda water, Joseph Priestley (1733-1804), was an early customer, paying a hefty three shillings (£17 in today’s money) for a single cube.

India rubber

This substance became known as “India rubber”, although it came from South America rather than India (“Indian” just meant something exotic from abroad; Indian ink was actually from China). The rubber had found its way from Brazil to Europe via the French.

In 1735, poet, mathematician and friend of Voltaire, Charles Marie de la Condamine, sent a sample back to the Académie Royale enclosing the local Indian word for the material, caoutchouc, and for the tree it came from, heve. La Condamine also coined the term latex for the white sap, from the French word for “milk”.

Rubbery plants

The rubber tree isn’t the only plant with rubbery sap, but it is the only one that produces more latex each time it is cut. The wound stimulates its rate of photosynthesis, giving each tree a productive life of up to 35 years.

It’s a large woody member of the Euphorbia family, which boasts over 7,500 species, many of them known as spurges, and almost all of them producing milky sap. The name “spurge” comes from the old French word espurgier – meaning “to purge”, because the plants were used as laxatives.

Euphorbia itself comes from the name Euphorbus, the physician to Juba II, a Roman client king in North Africa during the time of Augustus. Euphorbus effected a cure by feeding the king a spurge and Juba was so impressed he named the plant after him. It means, literally, “well-fed”.

Other high-profile members of the spurge family include cassava, the castor-oil plant and that Christmas favourite, the poinsettia.

Stolen rubber

Roughly 40 per cent of the rubber used today is from natural sources and of that

94 per cent comes from south-east Asia.

This is partly because the rubber tree is difficult to cultivate in South America (it quickly falls prey to blight), and partly through the audacious scam of a British entrepreneur called Henry Wickham (1846-1928). Wickham collected rubber tree seeds from the Brazilian jungle (70,000 according to his own unreliable account) and smuggled them back to the Botanical Gardens at Kew. Although fewer than four per cent germinated, this was enough to establish the British rubber plantations in south-east Asia.

Wickham was a fantasist and a terrible businessman. His attempts to establish farms in the wilds of Brazil and the Pacific were miserable failures. Nevertheless, he was eventually knighted and is still acclaimed as the “father of commercial rubber planting”.

Rubber boots

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, pioneered a new version of the slightly pointed, low-heeled, mid-calf short cavalry boot known as the Hessian boot (the style was popular with German officers from the Hesse region). Wellington extended it upwards to protect the knee. In 1853, the American businessman Hiram Hutchinson stole this popular style for his new rubber boot factory in France, called A l’Aigle (“To the Eagle”, in honour of the United States: and now just Aigle), and the rubber Wellington boot was born. It was an immediate hit with people working on the land.

So, a short history of the welly: designed by Germans, named by an Irishman, manufactured by an American and first worn by soggy-footed French peasants.

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